In the last few weeks fans of users the K Desktop Environment have been treated to a shipload of spectacular icon sets from well known and talented artists. Go ahead, liven up your desktop, there is bound to be a style that's right for you!

Here are a few of the many new or updated icon sets over the last couple of weeks.

Everaldo has impressed us all once again with the SVG (scalable) version of his icons. But, don't let the name fool you, Crystal SVG and Crystal GT differ in a lot more than merely file formats, Crystal SVG cleans up and adds many new icons giving it a much cleaner feel.

Carlitus updated his Noia icon set as well, now with many cleanups and quite a few new icons too. In the future, he plans to release the source of the icons so the set can grow at a faster rate and variants of Noia in natural and warm styles.

Korilla is a rework for KDE of Jimmac's popular Gorilla theme with blue colors. This port has been done mostly by SystemX.

Please check out all of these fantastic icon sets, they are all worth a look and quite comprehensive. Also, something to look forward to if you still didn't quite find your style is Slick 1.5, Amibug has gotten back in the game and is working diligently on Slick 1.5.

Graphic software and music software is a real problem on Linux. So I really wonder why the commercial programs are not ported.

For instance: I think there is a strong need for a KIMP program. However nobody started this project yet. The solution to the problem is the OSS development which is not driven by the needs of users but by the capabilities of programmers. So commmercial software for users is needed.

why do you believe that there is such a strong need for "KIMP"? The fact that nobody is investing time just to make it use Qt buttons/dialogs instead of GTK ones is prove enough that it doesn't change GIMP usabilty one single bit.

Gimp runs fine under KDE, to my knowledge outdoes Photoshop in many aspects and it a very old software project. GTK is founded on Gimp's own toolkit. Gimp had good enough interfaces long before KDE began.

As long as I can use Gimp under KDE, WTF is the problem with it? I really don't understand why you people want others to waste time on porting Gnome/GTK software to KDE. I rather suggest to make GTK, QT and KDE comply with freedesktop standards and then it doesn't matter much anymore.

Wasn't KDe- ang Gnome- icon-themes supposed to be merged? As far as I remember, they implemented some common standard, but they never standardized the names of icons that are the same in KDE and Gnome. This means that both KDE- and Gnome-iconthemes show up in KDE 3.2CVS when choosing icons, but choosing one of the Gnome-themes doesn't really work. Shouldn't that be fixed for 3.2 final?

It seems to me that mimetype.png and appname.png (where appname is a match of the actual binary or script) would be best. Use lots of symbolic links, and make mimetypes "fall back" to the main category. I.e., image.png, image-jpeg.png and image-bmp.png. If a image-gif file is read, display image.png.

Is it just me, or does KDE's icon layout come from BeOS? Maybe it's just at a glance - I haven't used BeOS much, and I'm guessing its layout from the icon archives I've downloaded.

Well as far as I remember the problem was just figuring out which icons corresponded to oneanother (e.G. the icon with the "go-left"-icon, the "stop loading"-icon, etc.). But a list convering the icons must already exist for the Gorilla-developers who make icon-themes for both KDE and Gnome.
So why not just take that list, and switch to using the Gnome-names in KDE? There shouldn't be much pride connected with those names, and as Gnome doesn't seem to have been able to handle the switch, let KDE do it. In exchange one could maybe ask Gnome to do something else that helps standardization.

Well, I believe KDe3.2 breaks compatibility with window decorations anyway, and what about widgets that weren't present in KDE before 3.2?
And as it should be easz to make a small script that runs through an icon theme and renames all icons in a matter of milli-seconds, it shouldn't be too hard to update all current icon themes to run on KDE3.2 .
Or am I mistaken?
But I do agree, symlinks should be employed imemdiatly! In fact, one should put them in all icon themes that are to be put into KDE3.2 and the Gnome-developers should be asked to do the same thng with the next x.x.1-update of their icon sets. Right now it just looks broken when one can choose anmong 5-10 icon themes of which half seem to be broken just because they belong to the other DE. The most helpful tool would probablz be somethng like a small python script and a list of icon-names that correspond which easily make an icon-theme that is both KDE- and Gnome-compatible out of anz KDE- or Gnome-icon-theme.

A user called Chroma who is working on a Gnome port of the Crystal SVG set has created such a Python script unknowingly of this thread. The script can be used to port any KDE icon theme to Gnome. It is still alpha/beta but easily usable in it's current state. A new thread will be created soley for the Python script, but for now the following link goes to the thread for the Gnome Crystal SVG project.

...and want to install Crystal SVG 1.0, I found that I had to modify the index.desktop file. The name of the theme was set to "Crystal SVG beta1", which collides with the default icon theme from CVS. So installing the new icon theme makes kconfig list "Crystal SVG beta1" twice, but selecting either of those activates the "old" theme from CVS. There's no way to activate the new theme. I changed the file "~/.kde/share/icons/crystal/index.dektop" so the name of the new set is "Crystal SVG 1.0", and now it works (and look fantastic!). I suppose I could have just installed the new theme as root in $KDEDIR/share/icons/.

does not include a scalable directory. It has svg in its name, but does not contain any svg icons (just png).. As this is the "official" location to download the Crystal SVG icons... maybe there's a separate svg-version available?

I tried to find the licence of icons used by KDE but could not find it. It seems that it is allowed to use them for GPLed software but it is unclear to me whether they can be used by commercial software.

Can anybody help me what the matter is or point me somewhere where I can find the licence under which the icons can be copied, changed and distributed?

Yeah, i realise that, but do the Suse icons need to be in there? They will only get used by suse users (which will include them in the distro)... i assume the version released with KDE 3.2 will not contain the suse icons.